Dragon Nest MMO loses two years of player data

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Massively-multiplayer online games are one of the most difficult games to get right and keep running. Each game needs enough players to cover the costs of renting the servers required to run it, while at the same time there’s a constant demand for new content while keeping the whole system safe and secure. However, South Korean developer Eyedentity Games has really screwed up on its free-to-play fantasy MMO Dragon Nest, managing to lose two years worth of player data.

The data loss relates to the European servers for Dragon Nest. On January 31st they went offline with a technical error. They didn’t come back online until February 5th, but when they did, players were informed there had been some serious data loss. It was the publisher, Shanda Games, who did the explaining:

“All titles, missions, quests, achievements, NPC points, guild points, cooking details, fishing details, trading house items, as well as inventory and storage items are gone for now. Cash Items have also been wiped.”

All players have left is their characters, gold, Dragon Nest Points (DNP), and Althea Crowns (AC). So basically, all progress through the game, even for long term players, has been wiped and no record remains.

As it’s a free-to-play game, it’s easy to walk away from and many players probably will following this news. However, Eyedentity and Shanda are understandably very keen to say sorry and compensate all players that have seen their game data destroyed, so they are putting together a reimbursement and compensation package.

All characters currently active in the game will be automatically bumped up to Level 80 with all mandatory and relevant quests/missions marked as completed. 100 gold will also be given out to each character allowing for quick skills setup, and Level 70 (legendary) materials and Level 80 (epic) equipment will be given to all. A full list of the compensation package can be found on the Dragon Nest Europe website.

What’s striking about this data loss is the obvious complete lack of backups, or at the very least backups kept on a different server and/or location. You can’t lose years of data if you are taking regular backups and storing them sensibly, so there is something fundamentally wrong with how the game is being managed by either Shanda’s or Eyedentity’s team.

It’s been pointed out in the comments at Siliconera that the data loss is actually “a win for 95% of the playerbase.” That’s due to the compensation being so good coupled with important items apparently being restored if you file a support ticket. However, new players won’t have a great time because the market is suffering massive inflation right now.